Episode 1: Edward Snowden (NSA Whistleblower)

American Edward Snowden has been living on the lam for over 7 years in foreign countries, attempting to escape international and domestic espionage and property theft charges filed against him in 2013 by the United States of America. How did a professed patriot at heart and former Army private with the highest levels of security clearance end up as America's Number 1 Enemy? Find out today on the Controversial Figures Podcast.

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Episode Sources:

• Permanent Record, Author Edward Snowden, New York : Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2019
• Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden
• Music: The 6 is Silent by Skyjelly

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Transcript

00:00
American Edward Snowden has been living on the lam for over 7 years in foreign countries, attempting to escape international and domestic espionage and property theft charges filed against him in 2013 by the United States of America. How did a professed patriot at heart and former Army private with the highest levels of security clearance end up as America's Number 1 Enemy? Find out today on the Controversial Figures Podcast.

00:28
Musical Interlude

00:54
Welcome to Controversial Figures; a podcast about intriguing figures in the media. My name is Tammy Hawkins. If you enjoy this podcast, please leave a 5 star rating and comment on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts - and don't forget to subscribe to the show. Visit Controversial Figures on Patreon and donate anything that  you can. I will give you a shout out on a future show, and send along occasional swag to regular donators. If you donate at higher tier levels, you will obtain access to additional content on a regular basis. And with that, let's discuss our Controversial Figure for today.

01:30
Edward Snowden was moved to join the military at 18 years old after the attacks of 9/11 in the United States in 2001. Soon after the attacks, he signed up to join the Army and scored high enough on entrance exams to qualify for training as a Special Forces sergeant. He entered Basic Training in Fort Benning, Georgia. Ultimately, however, he was discharged under 'administrative separation' due to having bilateral tibial fractures in both legs.

01:59
As Edward Snowden waited for his legs to heal, he became determined to serve his government using his mind instead of his body. He began applying for security clearances, ultimately obtained the TS/SCI clearance at 22 years old (that is the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance). Which is one of the top security clearances in the US government. This gave him access to compartments of information - these include. 

• SIGINT - Signals Intelligence, or intercepted communications 
• HUMINT - Human intelligence, or the work done and reports filed by agents and analysts 
• COMSEC - Communications security,  allowing him to work with cryptographic key material - code considered the most important agency secrets as they're used to protect all other agency secrets. 

02:45
Snowden was then employed for less than a year in 2005 as a security guard at the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Study of Language, a research center sponsored by the National Security Agency (or the NSA). Essentially cruising the halls of any empty top secret building that was still being built. At 23, he was hired into the CIA as a systems engineer with access to some of the most sensitive networks in the world (via contracting through BAE systems which hired COMSO who hired Edward). And therein lies the nested doll approach to contractors in the US government system.

03:30
At age 24, in 2007, Edward was stationed at the US Embassy in Geneva as a technologist deployed under diplomatic cover. He helped bring CIA European stations online, automating a US governmental spy network for European data.

03:44
At age 26, he was an employee of Dell working for the NSA. Edward claims the government often using contracting companies as a cover for their clandestine employees. In this role, he was sent to Japan, where he helped to design the agency's global backup for all the data they were gathering around the world.

04:04
At age 28, Edward returned to the USA to manage the team handling Dell's relationship with the CIA. In this role, he helped design and build a cloud network to store a series of large data lakes for quick, sensitive data access from anywhere in the world. He claims he didn't understand this at this time, because different teams were compartmentalized  and folks only knew bits of what they were building.  But ultimately Edward claims, he was assisting in setting up the infrastructure for mass surveillance. He was sent to Hawaii to perform these responsibilities. Working deep in a tunnel under a pineapple field. Per his words, Edwards said "had practically unlimited access to the communications of nearly every man, woman, and child on earth who'd ever dialed a phone or touched a computer - 320 million of my fellow American citizens."

05:00
Edward was working at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as an  employee and subcontractor for Booz Allen Hamilton - one of the largest contractors for defense and intelligence in the United States - when he would make a discovery that he decided he must tell the world, and which would change his life forever.

05:15
Snowden would only be in the American Intelligence Community for 7 years, ironically, which is now about the same amount of time he has been in exile in foreign countries attempting to escape the charges from the US government.

05:28
When Edward is asked why he came forward, he says, "I came forward because I witnessed a decline in the commitment of so-called advanced governments throughout the world to protecting…privacy, which I regard- and the United Nations regards - as a fundamental human right."

05:44
While working at Booz Allen Hamilton, Edward discovered documents on restricted access networks which revealed  global surveillance programs run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments.

06:02
A quote about what he was thinking at the time he discovered this, Edward  states "I participated in the most significant change in the history of American espionage - the change from the targeted surveillance of individuals to the mass surveillance of entire populations. I helped make it technologically feasible for a single government to collect all the world's digital communications, store them for ages, and search through them at will." It was upon this realization that Edward made the fateful  decision to download what he had found from the restricted access networks, and he decided that he would tell the world.

06:38
 In addition to U.S. federal documents, Edward Snowden also downloaded thousands of Australian, British and Canadian intelligence files.

06:47
In June 2013, the first of Snowden's documents were published  by The Washington Post and The Guardian, attracting wide public attention and outrage. The data disclosures continued throughout 2013.

06:59
In explaining why he released the data he did, Edward Snowden stated:  "I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded... My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them."

07:15
On June 14, 2013, United States prosecutors charged Edward Snowden with espionage and theft of government property. On June 21, his passport was revoked. Two days later, Edward Snowden flew into Moscow  where Russian authorities informed him that his U.S. passport had been cancelled. He was restricted to the airport terminal for over one month while they figured the situation out.  Russia granted Snowden the right of asylum with an initial visa for one year, however, repeated extensions have permitted Snowden to stay at least until 2020.

07:50
In November 2013, a criminal investigation of the disclosure was being undertaken by Britain's Metropolitan Police Service.

07:58
On September 17, 2019, his memoir Permanent Record was published. On the first day of publication, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil lawsuit against Snowden over publication, alleging he had breached nondisclosure agreements signed with the U.S. federal government.

08:15
Edward Snowden has been called many names. Hero, whistleblower, dissident, patriot, traitor responsible of treason. The data he leaked is considered the most significant confidential data leak in US history. Edward Snowden was condemned as putting the US intelligence capabilities in grave danger by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. 

08:37
Snowden has applied for political asylum to 21 countries and has been denied by basically every one. Snowden has accused the US Govt is using citizenship as a weapon, using tools of political aggression with other countries to give him no where to flee.

08:51
It is stated that Snowden potentially put many at risk with the data he released. And he's been called a hypocrite relative to building these systems he later decided he no longer agreed with and turned against. 

09:04
Edward Snowden himself states his actual breaking point was when he saw the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, lie under oath to Congress during his testimony on March 12, 2013 - it was during this testimony where, Clapper denied to the Senate that the NSA wittingly collects data on millions of Americans. Days later he began downloading the data to prove that was untrue. 

09:31
These disclosures brought to light surveillance being unknowingly conducted upon the common public of many countries around the world carte blanche. Exposing the governments who have taken additional liberties in the guise of battling terrorism to do warrantless wide surveillance of a large percentage of communications traversing the internet and phone lines. Often not only violating the privacy rights of the constituents of the observing government's jurisdiction, but also the rights of many other countries around the world and their citizens. The awareness risen by the disclosures of Edward Snowden around this situation has lead to a new wave of legislation around the world with data privacy front of mind -  GDPR is only one of many currently put into place. I'll leave it to you to decide.  Edward Snowden - is he an angel - is he a devil? He is certainly this week's Controversial Figure.

10:21
Thank you for listening to this episode of Controversial Figures.

10:25
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10:31
This podcast is an independent podcast created by Tammy Hawkins. This is funded by those that donate, so please join Patreon and give what you can - once I hit 50 Patreon subscribers, I'll send out swag to all donators! And I'll give shout outs during the show to anyone that has donated. Research references are available in the show notes as are musical references. Thank you so much for listening - be well.

10:59
Musical Interlude